Vista installation fiasco.

[sleeeves]

I have a very strange issue when trying to install Vista. The install actually goes along rather quickly without errors but before I get to the logon screen, things come to a CRAWL! Both the audio and video are extremely choppy. The circular Windows Vista logo slowly fades in at about 4 frames per second and the audio is ridiculously choppy, taking 20+ seconds to get past this logo and to the logon screen. Once logged in, everything is still slow, maximizing/minimizing windows takes forever, etc. I figured this was the video drivers, so installed the latest drivers for my 8600GT, no change. Updated the sound card drivers, no change. No conflicts in device manager to point me in the right direction. I've searched the web and I can only find a similar problem stemming from VIA RAID storage drivers - I installed the latest from VIA, no change again.

Does anyone out there have any ideas? I'll be very grateful for any assistance!

[Shield]

So you're booting from an onboard "SoftRaid" (i.e. no hardware processor) from an Nvidia N4Force motherboard?

Just for fun - shut the machine down, unplug one of the drives in the mirror. It will warn you that the array is degraded. See if your boot and access times improve. Then come back, and we'll discuss it further.
Shawn

[sleeeves]

I'm not using RAID at all. It was just suggested in some other forum that the problem I might be having is because the VIA RAID storage controller driver needed to be upgraded. I did this upgrade from the file available on the MSI website, but it didn't help. My mobo is an MSI P4M900M2-L. I do have two SATA drives connected but am not using RAID.

The next thing I'll check - I THOUGHT I did this already - is the Task Manager to see if some process is using 100% CPU...

[sleeeves]

Ok, I pulled up Task Manager and found nothing using 100% of the CPU - nothing even close. I opened the volume control, changed the volume setting so I could hear the "ding" sound, and see if Task Manager showed anything then, but as the ding was taking 10 seconds to play out, there was no abnormal processor usage showing in the Task Manager. When booting into Safe Mode, everything DOES run nice and quick. I'm not sure if Vista has the old "step by step" driver boot option, but I'll check and see if I can isolate the problem. Any ideas?

[heffe2001]

Might want to try taking all the extra hardware out of the machine, and try it with just what you need. Also, if you've got the Sidebar running, try exiting that (it's a hog no matter how you look at it). Would also be a good idea to disable Aero Glass and try it with the non-3d skin and see how it goes. All that stuff works great on a dual-core proc, but I'm not convinced that a P4-3.0 single core is enough to run with everything enabled (remember that Aero is basically your desktop on 3D, so it's already using your video card's processing power just to display the desktop. Safemode uses the basic desktop theme, without the glass effects. Also, what resolution are you running out to your TV via component, 1080i, 1080p, 720p, etc? That could also be causing some slowdowns. If it were me I'd not use anything less than a Core 2 Duo, at least 2.0mhz or more (would bench out MUCH faster than your existing 3.0), or go with a higher speed x2 from AMD (I'm using vista on a 4800 or 5000 x2 (cant' remember exactly, need to look when I get home)), and Vista works great on it. Pretty much the same system specs as yours other than that (7950gtx video card though).

[Yooper]

Is there hard drive activity? Vista does file indexing after the install - this takes a while to complete. This should run in the background, but it still takes system resources. You cannot turn this off - I tried. See if the file indexer is listed in the list of processes.

[Shield]

I shut mine off by disabling the file indexing service. Run "services.msc" from the run command, and set it to disabled.

[sleeeves]

I may try removing the hardware piece by piece, but I don't have much in there really, just the PCI-E 8600GT and the HVR-1600 cards. When I've gotten to the desktop, it was initially set to Aero basic, or whatever the non-glassy Aero is called. I've tried the basic and glassy and both give the same stuttering sound / display performance. I didn't notice the indexer running in Task Manager - there were no processes showing anything above 2 or 3 %. Even if the indexer were running after the install, I can't see it making the system completely unusable for any amount of time - but I'll try turning off indexing and see what happens...